The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Monday, October 13, 2014

The Trials of Jimmy Lai

I get the impression that the Western press isn’t
enthusiastic about reporting on Next Media supremo Jimmy Lai’s rather central
role in financing and backboning (a neologism of mine: providing critical
support/determination/coordination/encouragement) the Hong Kong Occupy
movement.

Jimmy Lai's partisanship, wheeling and dealing, hard-nosed
business practices, and antagonism toward Beijing complicate his reformist
advocacy and undercut HKO’s “spontaneous leaderless outpouring by idealistic
students” framing, and he’s not going to do the movement any favors by becoming
the face of democratic agitation in Hong Kong.

From what I’ve seen, when Jimmy Lai’s role comes up, a straw
man is promptly constructed out of the “Jimmy Lai is a CIA front” excelsior, contemptuously
torched, and tossed aside.

The Jimmy Lai story deserves better, in my opinion, especially
since the focus of the agitation is moving into the Hong Kong Legislative
Council, whose pro-democracy faction is heavily funded by Lai and will
presumably be responding to Lai’s influence as well as the democratic fire that
rages in its collective bosom.

As to why the Jimmy Lai story is not deemed to be worthy of
more in-depth and critical coverage, one theory might be that the Western press
is consciously pushing a certain pro-HKO PR line and intentionally gives short
shrift to the Jimmy Lai angle.

I tend toward the explanation that, as I put
it in a previous post, Big Media is interested in Big Stories.Democratic ferment sweeping Hong Kong is a
big story with implications for China and the entire world; Jimmy Lai’s machinations are just local news.

I can also speculate that news organizations may be guided,
consciously or not, by a sense of equity.

The pro-Beijing press and the PRC media are working day and night to put
the hatchet to Lai and shift the focus of the Hong Kong democracy story to him;
maybe there’s a natural inclination to shrink from doing the PRC’s dirty work
for it and so the mainland’s Jimmy Lai news is balanced with, you might say, non-Jimmy Lai news from the Western side.

Jimmy Lai certainly deserves some sympathy.It appears that Beijing has been conducting a
multi-front war against his media empire, and with considerable success.His flagship Hong Kong newspaper, Apple Daily
created and owned the splashy tabloid market at first.However, in recent years its circulation has
dropped by a third, to 190,000, thanks to heightened competition and the
introduction by the Sing Tao media company of a free newspaper (Apple Daily’s
cover price is now HK$7), Headline Daily.

Free is apparently popular, and the most recent circulation figures
for Headline Daily is over 800,000 copies per day.Jimmy Lai’s Next Media group tried to launch
a competing free sheet, Sharp Daily, with a target of 1 million copies per
day.However the venture folded a year
ago, in October 2013, after absorbing HK hundreds of millions of losses.

As a result, Next Media’s Annual Report was reduced to
trumpeting its EBITDA results.For the
layman, the message of EBITDA is, if you ignore our crushing mountain of debt,
we can pretend we are making money.In
2013, Next Media lost HK$ 1 billion, presumably mostly attributable to the
Sharp Daily bloodbath; but in 2012, the company had also lost money, a more
modest HK$ 200 million.

The fact that Apple Daily’s office is currently blockaded by
anti-Occupy forces that have been rather successful in keeping the paper off
the streets is not going to help the circulation figures or the bottom line in
2014, either.

Certainly, Hong Kong’s readership can be pleased that they
can enjoy their daily paper for free and perhaps not share a thought for the
financial beating that Jimmy Lai is taking.However, it is not being excessively conspiratorially minded to note
that Sing Tao News Corporation, the author of many of Jimmy Lai’s misfortunes,
is extremely close to Beijing and something more than business competition might have informed the devastating launch of Headline Daily.

Sing Tao News Corp. was owned by the Aw family of Tiger Balm
Garden fame until 1998, when Sally Aw, the proprietor was caught up
in a scandal involving inflated circulation figures and was simultaneously
hammered by the Asian financial crisis and a spate of bad financial
decisions.She escaped legal jeopardy,
however, and critics wondered if her close friendship with the Hong Kong Chief
Executive and Beijing’s man on the spot at the time, Tung Chee-hwa, kept her
out of the courts.

Sally Aw served as a member of the China National People’s Consultative
Congress, the PRC’s united-front talking shop.The Ho family, which bought her Sing Tao interest, is also very close to
Beijing and one is welcome to speculate that the sale was forced upon Aw to
make sure the papers stayed in friendly hands.Charles Ho, the current chairman, also a CNPCC delegate (actually, a member of its standing committee) and is openly
identified as “pro-Beijing”.He heads a
rather slush-fundy nonprofit, the Bauhinia Foundation, whose job is apparently to shake the tycoon money tree to fund study of Beijing’s
“one country two systems” formulation and, presumably, provide welcome
sinecures to deserving researchers and poobahs.

When the Chief Executive previous to C.Y. Lueng, David
Tsang, awarded Ho the “Bauhinia Grand Medal”, a piece of bling recognizing
unique contributions to Hong Kong (and partially compensating for the loss of
those ancient and brag-worthy British decorations) there was considerably griping
in the democratic quadrant as to his lack of worthiness.

The Sing Tao group, including its English-language offering,
the Standard, has been an important recipient and conduit for the leaks and
tittle-tattle concerning Jimmy Lai’s support of the democracy movement.

Sing Tao News Corporation recently announced after tax
profits of HK$30 million for the first half of 2014.Compared to Jimmy Lai’s operation, with its
HK billion-dollar loss last year, Sing Tao seems to be doing pretty good.

One has to wonder how long Lai can sustain these losses, and
one can wonder if his notorious trip to Burma with Paul Wolfowitz (Lai paid
Wolfowitz $75,000 to get him in front of the ruling generals in order to pitch
his business plans) was intended to open up a new financial front in a
jurisdiction that, unlike Hong Kong (and like Taiwan, which now accounts for
roughly half of Next Media’s revenues), is somewhat successfully wriggling out from beneath the PRC's thumb.

One can also speculate as to what would happen to Jimmy Lai’s
business interests and personal fortunes if pro-democratic agitation wrests
control of the Hong Kong executive out of the hands of his implacable enemies
in the pro-Beijing camp.

It might be understandable that some people might think that
it’s not right to help out the pro-Beijing pack trying to hound Jimmy Lai into
bankruptcy by looking into his role in the democracy movement.

Then again, if Hong Kong democracy is, as we are sometimes
told, the biggest and most important story on the planet, then what Jimmy Lai
did, what Jimmy Lai does, and what Jimmy Lai wants is probably newsworthy.